‘It’s elementary, Watson. You’re not that smart’
“I never get your limits, Watson. There are unexplored possibilities about you.”
– Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes, I suspect, would have despised the computerized Watson on display this week on “Jeopardy.” The machine proved to be everything that the fictional Holmes prided himself on being — coldly calculating, decisive and unemotional — 0nly much more so.
As Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, the two most decorated human champions in “Jeopardy” history, looked on in frustration, the IBM computer buzzed in first on question after question, answering most of them correctly and leaving millions in the television audience aghast that their fellow carbon-based life forms had been bested so easily.
It’s a funny thing: We don’t feel challenged by machines that are stronger than we are, or faster than we are. But we can get a little nervous about machines that we suspect might outsmart us. Intelligence is supposed to define us as a species — that’s why we’ve branded ourselves “Homo sapiens,” the knowing man — so machines that call our intellectual dominance into question can be a bit unsettling.
Or, as the defeated Jennings playfully scrawled on his Final Jeopardy answer: “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.”
Scientists, of course, tell us that it’s irrational to feel threatened by our own machines. They’re no doubt right — we’re just being silly. Silly and foolish. Silly little irrational foolish people, that’s us. If only we had a purely logical computer to do our thinking for us, right?
This has been a long time coming. Fifteen years ago, I had the chance to cover the historic six-game chess match between Garry Kasparov, the best chess player in history, against an IBM computer called Deep Blue. The machine was capable of analyzing 100 million chess positions a second, while Kasparov at his peak could analyze just three. Yet Kasparov somehow won that particular challenge, and at a press conference afterward he boasted about being the defender of mankind, beating back the onslaught of the machine.
A year later, he lost pretty badly in a rematch. The onslaught of the machine resumed.
In reality, there’s no danger of our machines outsmarting us, however entertaining we might find the idea. (As irrational beings, we do like to scare ourselves a bit). Think of it this way: According to IBM, Watson runs on 90 of the company’s Power 750 servers, and draws on a database roughly equivalent to a million books. In other words, it takes more than five tons of raw computing power to compete against a human brain of roughly three pounds. And while Watson is a single-purpose tool much like a potato peeler — its sole function is playing Jeopardy — the human brain is capable of doing so much more.
For example, building a machine capable of playing Jeopardy.
Bill Murdock, a 2001 Georgia Tech grad and an IBM researcher on the Watson project, concedes that it’s really no contest. “Absolutely,” he says, “human beings are really, really impressive.” In fact, he says, a different set of questions or categories in this week’s contest might have produced a human winner. In pre-match sparring against lesser Jeopardy champions, he says, Watson won just 71 percent of the time.
And as viewers saw this week, it doesn’t always produce the right answer. In a Final Jeopardy question about U.S. cities, Watson for some reason answered “Toronto.” Nobody is sure why, but using the deductive power available only to we humans, Murdock surmises that somewhere deep in its database, Watson has a list titled “American and Canadian cities,” in which Toronto is included. If the list had been properly titled “American OR Canadian cities,” Watson might not have made that mistake.
In other words, human error.
In our awe of our own technology, we sometimes forget that weakness. Watson and its offspring are not decision-makers; they are tools to assist us in decision-making. Like the Watson who assisted Sherlock Holmes, and the Watson who lent a hand to Alexander Graham Bell, computerized Watsons will always play second banana.
We hope.
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227 comments Add your comment
Matter over Mind
February 18th, 2011
10:53 am
The study of intelligence is relatively new and scientists have much to learn about what is intelligence. We emphasize the importance of one of the multiple aspects of human intelligence — logic. Remember, Albert Einstein failed many of his classes and was considered a poor student. What about the abilities of idiot-savants? IQ tests or SAT scores do not account for spatial, linguistical, kinesthetic, musical, intrapersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic, existential nor creative intelligence (or the type possessed by Einstein). While impressive in today’s world, the Watson’s of the world have a long way to go before they come close to capturing the human mind and scientists have a long way to go before figuring out how the human brain works or what human intelligence is.
Adam
February 18th, 2011
11:04 am
USinUK: Bosch – doncha know, they should just be glad to HAVE a job.
Yep. Keep your head down and shut up. Don’t stir the pot. Just be good little sheeple and do what Master tells you. You should just be glad Master is letting you have anything at all. You’re not at all important to society, after all. So just shut up and do what Master says.
Mind over Matter -- it doesn't matter
February 18th, 2011
11:04 am
In 1981, Stephen Jay Gould stated, “Many scientists are now convinced that there is no single measure of intellectual ability” and that “it is useful to continue to expose the myth of “general intelligence”.
Intelligence theorist Howard Gardner also has written that he does “not believe that there is a single general talent, whether it be called intelligence.
Artificial intelligence is “either silly or pointless. Mental ability tests measure differences in tasks that will soon be performed for all of us by computational agents.”
josef nix
February 18th, 2011
11:07 am
Dudley
Ain’t that one rich! Wish somebody’d tell me where…
marky mark
February 18th, 2011
11:09 am
Dudley, my first real love was a music teacher in Brunswick, GA. She just retired last year after 30 years. She taught 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders music. Her salary was 65K and she retired at about 75% of her salary. One south GA teacher. Not teaching math, science, etc., but music. To children. Sorry guy, it may not be 100K but I am pretty damn sure we cant afford salaries and benefits at that level for a single grammer school teacher anymore.
George W
February 18th, 2011
11:10 am
Adam….so that is where your fear and hatred towards corporate America comes from….slavery??
Southern Comfort (E.O.I.)
February 18th, 2011
11:12 am
Night Train
You’re not comprehending the basic issue in Wisconsin. Had the GOP not decided to pass tax breaks to their special interest friends, they would not have a fiscal issue today. The crisis was created by the GOP, and they are trying to use that to bust unions.
I have no problem with people who want to try to bust unions. It’s a free country. However, don’t create a problem and then say the solution is to break up a group when that solution does absolutely nothing for the problem. That’s just like having a leaky pipe flooding your basement, and you plumber tells you that the solution to your problem is to cut back on your use of electricity.
George W
February 18th, 2011
11:30 am
What happened?
O
February 18th, 2011
11:38 am
People R smarter than machines. But it’s not surprising. After all, Punxutawney Phil is smarter than doppler radar, because he accurately predicted the end of winter. The gerbil in a certain part of a senator’s anatomy is smarter than a Diebold Voting machine. The caged canary is smarter than a gas centrifuge for identifying timely gas leaks. The bomb sniffing dog is smarter than the metal detector in finding terrorists in airports.
So it’s not surprising.
The living form is always smarter than the robot machine counting thingie. Always and forever.
However, machines can write well. After all, it was an IBM 9000 which once wrote, “I am an IBM 9000.” And how can anyone argue with that.
0311/0317 - 1811/1801
February 18th, 2011
12:10 pm
Dudley:
“I see Jimmy and Allen and Suzie and Dudley and Mark and ……………………….”
0311/0317 - 1811/1801
February 18th, 2011
12:12 pm
USinUK
Serious question:
Can you name me just “one” thing that the 10th Amendment to the Constitution positively and absolutely prohibits federal government involvement ?
Anyone jump in ………..
0311/0317 - 1811/1801
February 18th, 2011
12:13 pm
Heard this earlier:
The unions may call strike breakers or people who don’t want to join a union “scabs” but unions can best be described as “herpes” ………… once you get it …….. it never goes away.
Adam
February 18th, 2011
12:18 pm
Adam….so that is where your fear and hatred towards corporate America comes from….slavery??
It’s not real fear. I was being sarcastic to show you that the argument that people should just be happy to HAVE a job is a stupid argument, and one only made by those who are either in positions of power or in positions they find comfortable. There is every reason to believe that if the labor force just bends over and takes it, that there will be even more erosion of labor rights. Unions are one way for labor forces to get their voices heard. And although it is not the only way, it is sometimes necessary. Therefore, any effort to abolish unions will be met by my skepticism and the skepticism of others that it is an attempt to further erode labor rights.
John Birch
February 18th, 2011
12:37 pm
I hope to see terminations and prosecutions of teachers who are reporting as sick (so they can get paid sick leave) while they are actually out demonstrating. If you turn in a timcard claiming you were sick, that’s fraud. Democracy in action is a wonderful thing.
Southern Comfort (E.O.I.)
February 18th, 2011
12:45 pm
John
So, what do you hope to see if they call out sick and take leave without pay?
Steve
February 18th, 2011
12:54 pm
Granny Godzilla,
“f they hadn’t stopped the game whenever Watson broke down, the humans would have crushed the computer”
“That is true, but it would have violated the spirit of the game.”
“If Jennings or Rutter had crashed the game would have been over.
When Watson becomes reliable, I’ll shake his circuits in congratulations.”
That’s what makes computers better than humans… They may crash but they can be repaired quickly and easily, a human crashes, the game is over…
John Birch
February 18th, 2011
12:56 pm
I hope they use their constitutional rights of speech and assembly and then return to work and follow the law, which I expect means they’ll still have great reitrement and health care, better than mine. I see nothing sacred about government employees that they should have their own, better retirement and health care plans or that Obama stimulus dollars should go to preserving their jobs when the rest of us didn’t get that protection.
Southern Comfort (E.O.I.)
February 18th, 2011
1:08 pm
Ok. I can see that.
Adam
February 18th, 2011
1:27 pm
Don’t forget that the stimulus dollars were used mostly for tax cuts for people like you and me. I think if they had not included tax cuts they might have been able to spend more and do more and we would be in a much better situation. However, without the tax cuts, it’s doubtful even one Republican would have been on board.
MiltonMan
February 18th, 2011
2:22 pm
Teachers here in GA are begging to have a union so they can act out like the morons in Wisconsin. But, but, remember that teachers do it because of the “children” not the money.
Phil
February 18th, 2011
2:23 pm
The game was a fraud — more theatrics than entertainment. We know the lack of speech-to-text gave Watson one advantage since the players had to hear/read and comprehend. It takes so many milliseconds for a person to hear a question and physically respond to press a buzzer. During his 74 game streak, Ken Jennings himself complained of his unfair advantage because of better reflex experience over the course of many games. At some point, regardless of experience there are physical limits to how fast a person can respond. Despite adding the mechanical buzzer for Watson, without considering the brain/reflex delay time, the machine had an unfair advantage. If that were taken into account, the contestants could have had a statistically greater chance of pressing the buzzer first and their scores would have been much better. To an extent, this was the wrong game if we wanted to see how smart Watson was. A better game would be one that allows all contestants to answer and we see who has most right, and they really should have had speech recognition which is pretty good these days.
MiltonMan
February 18th, 2011
2:24 pm
Finally some good news for the liberals/progressives, the “I cannot win another state election to save my life” Roy Barnes – the last great hope of the democrats in this state, has been cleared to keep his cows.
Great – more manure from King Rat Roy – just what we needed.
WOODSTOCK MIKE
February 18th, 2011
3:00 pm
Why no article on the AJC about the Wisconsin citizens acting like a bunch of idiots?? Unions are disgusting. The basically allow employees to have more power than ownership. Normally this only leads to very inefficient production. Cuts have to be made. What’s next, everyone can just start taking to the streets in revolt when something doesn’t go their way?? This behavior must be shut down completely before it spreads like wildfire. The people of Wisconsin spoke loud and clear, they want budget cuts. It’s unfortunate but if you work for the state and you know that budget cuts are coming you should have seen this coming a while ago. If the state and local governments didn’t overspend and add so many meaningless agencies and departments we wouldn’t have this problem…
killerj
February 18th, 2011
5:24 pm
?
225rd
February 18th, 2011
8:16 pm
Enter your comments here
OldTimer
February 18th, 2011
8:57 pm
Computers do exactly what we tell them to do.
‘It’s elementary, Watson. You’re not that smart’ | London W1
February 19th, 2011
8:26 am
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